Not all stories end well. We all live in a story or a movie of our own life and just like viewing one on screen that we’re not familiar with, we don’t know how it ends, but we hope it ends well. Many movies end in irony, many lives end in some degree of peace but often, an uneasy peace or peace with an asterisk. Shakespeare wrote both comedies and tragedies. Some stories are unmitigated hard endings. In our own experiences, we all hope for a good ending to a story or a chapter, but realistically, we have no guarantee that the end of a chapter or story won’t be attended by troubles, not just personal, but as a mark of the times. To know this is to be forewarned and ready to mitigate our course as best as we can. I sometimes think of those who’s natural course of life was to breath their last during WWI or WWII or during any other of the major upheavals that attended to our recent history. I don’t even mean those who bravely fought and died or the millions of holocaust victims. If someone died during the term of a war, they would never have known the world will return to some modified peace and prosperity someday in the future once the dictators are dead, the revolutions over, the aggressors defeated. I’m slowly coming to believe or fear that this kind of misfortune will come upon this present older generation. We are like Weimar Germany, ca 1930s, barreling toward darkness with nary any brakes. The old working institutions are dead or in danger of collapse. The world has descended into madness where criminals are rewarded with freedom and the civil are locked up. Merit is regarded as toxic, and parasites are elevated. Child mutilation is defended from the highest office in the land and women have been written out of existence entirely but embrace it. Men are above all greedy but also craven and venal. Those that know are silent and they fear, even knowing that their silence will hasten what they fear. We’re descending into one party coercive rule as our enemies have literally bought their way to our gates and rewarded our present commander in chief with his thirty pieces of silver. America as we’ve known it may not survive the next election and its constitution, government of checks and balances, and its borders may not exist at all shortly thereafter. Many aged now making their way into the hereafter leading up to and beyond the coming potential darkness will not see or imagine whatever comes after when the present spirit of chaos is finally vanquished and collapses into its own subsequent ruin. The coming darkness is avoidable but as many stories have gone, it won’t be avoided, and the only path will be through it but that will likely not include many of the protections of liberty that we’ve always assumed would be here for us. Not all stories end well. We need to be ready to pull the emergency cord.